I started life as a journalist and political operative. I'm a consultant and the author of "Reinventing You" and "Stand Out." I also teach for Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. You can download my free 42-page Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook at http://www.dorieclark.com/join.

Be Interesting - or Be Ignored

It’s no secret: traditional marketing techniques are getting less effective every day. “How many people answer their phone without looking at who’s calling?” asks Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of marketing software company HubSpot. “People don’t do that anymore.” Direct mail hasn’t fared much better. “The average U.S. household gets 40 pounds of direct mail per year, and the sad part is that 41% of that mail never gets opened. It’s straight to the landfill.”

The only viable alternative, he says, is inbound marketing – “the kind of marketing you’d want done to you.” By creating relevant content that people actually want to seek out, you’re positioning yourself for long-term success. In contrast to traditional advertising, says Shah, “With inbound marketing, you haven’t paid your way into someone’s life. You have to earn it.” Appropriately enough, I spoke with Shah last week at the Inbound Marketing Summit, where we were both speakers. Here’s his advice on how a business can get started.

Test the premise. If your company has been reliant on paid search advertising, Shah advises shifting a small amount of your ad budget toward inbound marketing. “I’ve seen that companies will be able to displace more and more of their ad budget with the content they’re creating,” he says. “The nice thing is that when you do pay-per-click, you’re renting attention, and as soon as you stop paying rent, you won’t get that visibility anymore. But if you write a blog article today that’s really good and useful, even if you stop writing tomorrow, it will continue to deliver traffic. It’s an asset that keeps delivering.”

NextNext, master the content. “The most common mistake businesses make,” says Shah, “is to focus too much on self-promotion, rather than focusing on their customers. Ask yourself what the customer is looking for, what questions they have, what they need to learn about the industry, what problem are they having.” In the early days of HubSpot, he literally forbade his bloggers from mentioning the company in their posts. “We never ran promotions, never talked about pricing – it was the ‘marketing without marketing’ model,” he says. Their focus on customers’ concerns (rather than self-promotion) paid off; they now employ more than a half-dozen staffers to create content.

Find your medium. Different social media channels work for different companies – so try a variety and measure the impact, says Shah. Some companies with visual products may do really well with Pinterest; others may excel with podcasts. “Experiment and do more of what works,” he says. He also counsels businesses not to be afraid of video. “The reservation folks have is they believe in order to do video well, you have to have high production values, but that’s not true. We live in the age of YouTube, and as long as it’s interesting and useful, production values don’t count for all that much. Most people have a perfectly acceptable video device sitting in their pocket, the iPhone, so you can turn the camera on yourself, have someone interview you, or take a video at a conference. People overthink how hard it is to use video, but that will change over time.”

Keep it simple. With the rise of mobile, Shah also encourages businesses to focus on what matters – the content, not what he calls the “dressing around the content.” In recent years, he believes web design often bordered on the precious: “It was very focused on being pixel-perfect, with just the right shade of blue.” That may have been an acceptable indulgence in the past – but now it represents a fundamental hindrance. “What people care about is content. They don’t care about fancy graphics; that gets in the way. What you want is elegant, fast, simple design.”

Does your company use inbound marketing? What are your techniques to draw customers in, and make them want to come back?

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

This is a great start to introducing the concept of Inbound Marketing. But one thing I believe needs stressing: Strategy. You need an Inbound Marketing strategy to be clearly defined BEFORE you leap in and start doing the above. No difference here to what’s needed with any marketing exercise, really, but we have found that people adopting Inbound tend to leap in and “just do it”. Better to define the usual items for a strategy before you start, though, or you will find that you expend effort and money and don’t achieve your objectives. How can you, if you don’t know what the goals really are? Inbound Marketing Strategies encompass the usual marketing strategy components (SWOT, Five Ps, etc.), but they should also include the following 3 components: 1) SEO – you need to know what your “online brand identity” is – the keywords your prospects will type into Google to search for your solution online. This is one of the principal ways your audience will find you and if you get this wrong, the wrong people will find your site. Everything else from this point onward will be wrong, too, so its essential to hire an SEO expert to make sure you avoid wasting the remainder of what you are about to do. 2) Social Media Marketing strategy. Which SM platforms to work (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc, which discussion forums to join; what to say (and not to say), who to say it to, when to tweet, and what to write about in your blog. All of these activities should use your keywords as frequently as possible, and all of this should be done to support the overall strategy. And don’t forget to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the goals you set in your strategy and then measure them! If you don’t measure, you can’t improve. 3) A Content Strategy. You touched on this in the post, but to create the strategy and then the content is the single biggest barrier to success. Creating this strategy and then creating the white papers, case studies, videos and special purpose tools is a significant undertaking. You will want to create just the items of content you need, and no more. If you would like to learn more about all of these strategies, and especially how to draft your own, our website has a great to offer: http://www.inbound-marketing-automation.ca

But let me add a short recommendation on “Test the premise. If your company has been reliant on paid search advertising, Shah advises shifting a small amount of your ad budget toward inbound marketing”. Although it does matter how much you shift to test inbound marketing, try to keep numbers and calculate the return of investment (ROI) for your both methods. Compare the result of your test with your control (outbound marketing ROI). If you get your targeted objectives through inbound marketing, then shift a huge amount for next campaign. Most of the time, I get about 200% ROI through combination of inbound and outbound marketing

I couldn’t agree more! It’s great to see how many companies are integrating social media into their marketing strategy and how effective it is. I was primarily using Facebook and Twitter for my business for awhile and was a little bit hesitant about jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon. But after coming across so many resources about how awesome it is, it’s been a tremendous help to my biz. An excellent Pinterest Influencer Network I’ve come across that’s been really helpful worth mentioning is PinLeague. Just wanted to pass the word along. Thanks!

Nice article, lots of useful information here. I find the importance of inbound marketing and great content crucial here because companies need to shift their goals. That is, making the customer feel awesome with great content instead of relying on the customers to become more popular. When we cater our content to genuinely reach and engage our viewers the message will gain more momentum. I’ve found that by using a social media monitoring and network discovery tool like, My Viral Web I can build a more relevant and interested network in which to share content. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of tools like this but they definitely as leverage to your efforts. Thanks for the read, T